Paul Thomas Anderson grew up in the San Fernando Valley, son of a horror-movie television host and a housewife who taught him piano. He dropped out of film school after two days, used the tuition refund to make a short called Cigarettes and Coffee, and sold his first feature, Hard Eight, at twenty-six. He has paid for his own graduate education in
Biography
Paul Thomas Anderson grew up in the San Fernando Valley, son of a horror-movie television host and a housewife who taught him piano. He dropped out of film school after two days, used the tuition refund to make a short called Cigarettes and Coffee, and sold his first feature, Hard Eight, at twenty-six. He has paid for his own graduate education in cinema ever since.
Boogie Nights announced him in 1997. Magnolia in 1999 declared him a director of appetite, compassion, and musical audacity. There Will Be Blood in 2007 entered the conversation for greatest American film of its century. The Master in 2012, Phantom Thread in 2017, and Licorice Pizza in 2021 extended a run so consistent that studios have stopped arguing about budgets.
He writes every film himself. He shoots on 35mm and 65mm film. He is, along with Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, one of the last major American directors to insist on celluloid. His regular collaborators — Daniel Day-Lewis, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joanna Newsom, Jonny Greenwood, Thomas Newman — describe a workshop atmosphere in which he rewrites during production in longhand, on legal pads, and hands pages to actors twenty minutes before the camera rolls.
He has been nominated for eleven Academy Awards. He has never won. He has said publicly that he does not care. He lives in the San Fernando Valley with the comedian Maya Rudolph, his partner since 2001, and their four children. He writes most mornings in a garden shed behind the house.
One Battle After Another, his 2025 adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is widely expected to be his first film to win Best Picture. Whether it does or not, the catalog is already settled. Paul Thomas Anderson is what the American film industry looks like when it is in its best form.
